


DRN Protocol #71381: Decision-Making Based on Emotional Responses

by thegrumblingirl



Series: Protocols [3]
Category: Almost Human
Genre: M/M, basically fluff, flufftastic, mostly domestic fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-20
Updated: 2013-11-20
Packaged: 2018-01-02 04:54:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1052751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegrumblingirl/pseuds/thegrumblingirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Do you have anywhere to live?” John asked, following a sudden thought.</p><p>Dorian looked about as surprised, his usually open expression shaded with confusion as he turned away from the database hologram.</p><p>“I mean, you don’t just stand in a corner of the precinct with your eyes open, waiting for orders, right? You sleep.” The last part, he could utter with conviction, because he’d watched as Dorian had actually fallen asleep during their stake-out last week.</p>
            </blockquote>





	DRN Protocol #71381: Decision-Making Based on Emotional Responses

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know what to do with all these feels.

“Do you have anywhere to live?” John asked, following a sudden thought.

Dorian looked about as surprised, his usually open expression shaded with confusion as he turned away from the database hologram.

“I mean, you don’t just stand in a corner of the precinct with your eyes open, waiting for orders, right? You sleep.” The last part, he could utter with conviction, because he’d watched as Dorian had actually fallen asleep during their stake-out last week.

“I told you, it’s not so much sleep as —”

“ — a memory-compressing routine, I know. But you were tired.”

Dorian shrugged. “I was. My emotional programming means that I feel what you feel, and even though it takes a lot for me to get worn out physically, feelings are exhausting.”

“Yeah. Yeah, they are.” Kennex shifted in his chair. Dorian interrupted before he could disappear down that particular rabbit hole.

“When we aren’t chasing cases all night anyway, I sometimes sleep at Rudy’s lab.”

John pulled a face. “That can’t be comfortable.”

“He’s got a few cots everywhere. It’s better than being suspended from the ceiling,” Dorian smiled easily, and John found himself smiling back. The DRN was about to turn back to his work when he frowned. “What’s brought this on?”

“Hm? Oh, I was just… well, you know where I live, obviously, but I’ve never… dropped you off anywhere specific, you just… leave, sometimes.”

Dorian smiled again. “Apology accepted.”

“I wasn’t —”

“You were.”

John sighed. “I was.”

 

A few weeks later, John offered Dorian to crash at his place.

“C’mon, the precinct is the whole way across town. You can stay at mine. It’s too big just for me, anyway.”

“Then why’d you keep it?”

“My father built it.”

“Oh. I’d like to see it.”

 

Dropping himself on the sofa with a sigh, John listened with one ear as Dorian quietly moved through the house.

“I guess the one opposite your bedroom is the guest room?”

“It is. Like it?”

“Yeah. Thanks for letting me stay here tonight.”

“You’re welcome.”

Regarding Kennex, who didn’t seem inclined to move anymore at all that night, Dorian remained silent for a minute before he asked, “Shouldn’t you eat something before you go to bed?”

All he got in reply was a soft snore.

 

The next morning, John awoke in his own bed, dressed down to his pants and t-shirt. Blinking, he was still wondering how exactly he’d gotten here after dozing off on the couch, when he heard someone move around in the kitchen. He was halfway out of bed in alarm when he remembered that he’d invited Dorian to stay over. Dorian — Dorian had tucked him in. Oh, great.

He grabbed a new pair of jeans and a clean sweater from his wardrobe (wait, where had the old ones gone?) and then ventured out of his room into the rest of the house.

“Dorian?” As anticipated, he found him in the kitchen. “Are you… are you making breakfast?”

“You like bacon and eggs, right?”

“Yeah, I do, but you don’t have to—”

“See, and I wanted to try it, so I made enough for two. C’mon, sit down, they’re almost ready. I was about to come wake you.”

“You know how to cook,” was all John had left to say.

“Yeah. Why not?” Dorian shrugged.

“I gotta have a word with Rudy someday...” John muttered under his breath before sitting down at the counter.

Dorian, who had excellent hearing, smiled to himself. “Coffee?”

 

“Thanks for breakfast,” John said as they walked towards the car.

“You’re welcome. Thanks for letting me stay. I like your house. I think I understand why you haven’t moved.”

“You’re —” John stopped himself. Then began again. “When I said ‘you’re welcome’ yesterday, I meant that. I mean, I literally meant that. You’re welcome to stay over whenever you need.”

Dorian smiled, a trace of surprise shimmering through like the blue LEDs underneath his skin. “Thank you. I appreciate that.”

John nodded. They got in the car, and no more was said about it.

 

At first, Dorian only accompanied him home perhaps once every few days, but after a few more months, Dorian ended up staying over most nights of the week. It became a habit, and they fell into it with all the carelessness of two people hiding exactly how much it meant to them.

John slept better, knowing the house wasn’t empty all around him, knowing there was someone he could trust right across the hall. Over the months, Dorian had become the one he followed into combat blindly, trusting his instincts. Dorian had taught him to trust his leg, too. It was slow progress, but after a while, the leg had stopped beeping and complaining for almost a full week, and Dorian’s wide grin had nearly split his face when he’d noticed. Coming to accept Dorian into his life seemed to have a direct line to his relationship with his blasted leg, too. John compensated by making breakfast a lot more often than he used to.

 

When a raid during one of their cases went horrifically wrong, it wasn’t John who ended up in hospital, it was Dorian who had to be rushed to Rudy’s lab. Instead of waiting for a squad car to escort them back to the precinct, John had grabbed his partner, practically carried him to his own slightly battered vehicle, and raced downtown. He’d kept talking to Dorian the entire ride, trying to keep him awake, violating every traffic rule ever laid down in law. They’d made it just in time.

During the week that Dorian had to stay with Rudy for repairs and software updates and tests, John came by every night and sat with him before going home.

“How’re the tubes treating you?” he’d tease, and Dorian would swat a hand at him before, sometimes, said hand would go off on a software bug-induced tangent. After freaking out the first time, the times after that John just caught Dorian’s hand in his own, holding on for a second, waiting for the errant impulses to subside.

He tried to apologise for what happened, but Dorian wouldn’t let him.

“We went in together, we got out of it together. We’re good, John.”

John nodded — but he wasn’t good. Not entirely.

When he got home that night, his house was empty, and it stayed empty. No-one hummed softly to themselves as they got ready for bed, no-one strayed into the kitchen for some milk and cookies while John settled down on the sofa, toeing off his shoes. When John woke up that night, fighting off the dregs of a bad dream filled with uncertain memories, Dorian wasn’t home.

The next morning, he went down to see Rudy and Dorian before his shift. Seeing the look on his face, Rudy made himself scarce, muttering something about port cables.

“You look terrible,” Dorian observed without scruple, but with audible concern. “Something wrong?” He watched as John settled on the low wheely chair beside his stretcher.

“You know how you explained to that sex bot how emphatic bonding worked?” John seemed to sidestep the question, but Dorian merely tilted his head instead of jumping in. “How you know when they’re there — but you also know when they’re not there?”

A small smile bloomed on Dorian’s face. “Is this your way of telling me you missed me?”

John struggled to raise his eyes to Dorian’s at first, but then he shrugged and looked straight at him. “Yeah, I guess it is. Is that alright?”

Dorian’s smile widened. “I missed you, too.”

 

The evening after Dorian’s first day back on duty, John stretched out on the couch, listening to the sounds of Dorian putting a few of his clothes back into the dresser in his room. When he returned to John’s field of vision (which he basically hadn’t been allowed to leave all day), he simply lifted John’s feet and sat down on the sofa. John bent his synthetic leg to rest the foot on the floor and dropped the left one on Dorian’s lap for his trouble.

“You didn’t even tease me about having to ride with an MX while you were gone,” he murmured.

Dorian shrugged. “Felt sorry for the poor MX already, didn’t want you to get riled and take it out on them.” For all that it was delivered in Dorian’s colloquialism routine, it had John narrow his eyes.

“Now that,” he nudged Dorian’s shin with his foot, “was a little too casual. Admit it, you don’t like the thought of me riding with someone else.”

Dorian huffed. “Ok, are you just taking the mickey, or are you actually interested in having this conversation?”

A little caught off guard by the vehemence in Dorian’s voice, John could only raise an eyebrow. “Something you wanna tell me?”

Put on the defensive, the DRN shrugged. “Don’t know, something in particular you don’t wanna hear?”

“Hey, hey.” John pushed himself into a sitting position and put a hand on Dorian’s arm. “Didn’t mean to ruffle your feathers.”

Dorian looked down at John’s fingers where they had curled around his forearm. “Sorry, I just... You’re right. I don’t like the thought of you with someone else. While I was out, so to speak — when Rudy wasn’t running tests, I pretty much couldn’t do anything except lie there, but I couldn’t go to sleep, either, so I just… laid there. For days on end, not like… not like when I’m here, with you. And I was wondering what you were doing, how the cases were going, if you were out or at home or...” Dorian trailed off, shaking his head. Not one to miss an opportunity for a follow-up question, John leaned forward into Dorian’s space, trying to get his attention, his focus.

“Or what, Dorian?”

“Or on a date,” Dorian finished, the tension in his shoulders betraying the kind of reaction he expected from John — the angry kind. After months of butting into his business, never taking no for an answer, and usually (but not always) getting his way, getting John to open up, this was the one thing that gave Dorian pause? John frowned.

“I haven’t been dating since… uh… since you moved in. And, well, not really before that, either,” he concluded.

Dorian chanced a glance at him. “Is that what you call it?”

“What?”

“Me sleeping here all the time. You don’t say ‘moving in’ when you mean a guest.”

John huffed a laugh. “You’re not a guest, Dorian. The first few nights, maybe, but not as soon as you started staying over most of the time. Unless you… unless you’d like to find your own place to stay. I’m sure we could —”

“No,” Dorian cut him off mid-word. “No, I don’t want to. Can you remember some of the things I said when you were driving me to Rudy’s?”

“Uh...” John tried to think, but in his panic, he’d even forgotten most of the things _he_ had said to keep Dorian conscious and listening to him. “Remind me?”

“I said, ‘I want to go home.’ I meant, here. I was feeling terrible, like I was dying, if there’s some way that that feels the same for me as it does for you, and I wanted to be here. With you.”

John lowered his gaze, resisted the urge to scratch the back of his head in uncertainty. There was a leap to take here, and it was right in front of him. At length, he ventured, “Moving in can have different meanings as well, you know.”

“I do. I ran statistics,” Dorian added, a little sheepishly.

“And what do your statistics tell you?”

“That it is significantly more likely that explicitly ‘moving in together’ refers to being… involved, rather than just sharing a house. And...”

“And?”

“And that, usually, asking the other to move in with you is a big step in a relationship.”

John let out a soft chuckle. “I didn’t even ask you. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just assumed this was alright.”

“It was! It is. It’s what I wanted. Still want.”

Somewhere down the line, John had started gently running his thumb up and down Dorian’s arm. He could feel warmth through the thin material of Dorian’s sleeve. Core temperature regulation, Dorian had explained, the same tech that ran through his leg. As human as possible. When they’d started out together, John had reminded himself that Dorian was a synthetic to keep him at arm’s length. Now, John reminded himself of the fact that ‘Dorian’ was a derivative of DRN precisely because he didn’t _want_ to keep him at arm’s length anymore. Significantly less than arm’s length, actually.

Dorian frowned at his prolonged silence. “John? What do you mean, you didn’t ask? You did, kinda. You told me I was welcome whenever I wanted to come over, I took you up on that.”

John drew a deep breath, held it, and then let it out slowly. “I meant… I didn’t ask you to move in with me. Not like I wanted to. Properly.”

“Oh.” For a while, neither of them said anything. Finally, Dorian said: “Yes.”

Confused, John looked back up at him. “Yes to what?”

“Were you asking? ‘Cause I’d like to move in with you. Properly.”

John’s eyebrows shot up to his hairline, but all the while a broad grin parted his lips. “You would?”

“I’m still here, aren’t I?”

“I guess you are.”

Dorian’s grin was just as bright as his — until he leaned forward, into John, and for the next half minute or so all John could think was, _I’m kissing a DRN. I’m kissing my partner. Shit, I’m kissing Dorian. Oh God, he’s kissing me._

When they came up for air, John brushed his nose against Dorian’s temple before asking, aware of the impending gracelessness: “How do you know how to do that?”

Dorian chuckled. “I observe. I have… a database.”

“Yeah, well, but knowing how it’s supposed to be done and actually… you know, that’s not the same thing.”

“Are you saying I just blew your mind?”

“Shut up.” John leaned in to kiss him again.

 

Eventually, they had to face the facts.

“We’re on the morning shift.”

“I know.”

“We have to get some sleep. Crime-fighting is no fun without sleep.”

“Good thing I already know you can be ridiculous, or I might come to think doing this messed up your circuits.” John brushed his lips against Dorian’s one more time before moving to get up. Dorian stood up, too, following him down the hall.

They went through their evening routine quietly and mostly side by side, until Dorian went up to the door of his room. He put his hand on the doorknob and hesitated, waiting as John came out of the bathroom. John caught his eye.

“What is it?”

“I find myself… I’ve reached a point where making a decision based on nothing but emotional responses is getting… a little overwhelming.”

“I know the feeling,” John replied sardonically. Seeing Dorian’s stricken expression, he softened. “It’s your call. But I’ll have you know that after being alone for over a week, I wouldn’t mind sharing at all.”

“I’ve never… done any of this.”

“We won’t put any of that statistical knowledge to the test unless you say so. Any of it.”

“Sharing sounds good.”

“Then sharing it is.”

 

Slowly, carefully, they arranged themselves under the covers of John’s bed, until John was on his back, with Dorian pressed against his side, half draped over him.

“This feels amazing.”

John hummed in agreement, tightening his arms around Dorian and pushing his nose into the short-cropped hair.

“Thank you,” Dorian murmured quietly.

“Mmh, for what?”

“For believing this is real.”

John blinked a few times in the darkness. Ultimately, he shrugged gently. “You’re my partner.”


End file.
